Memory- Are Gender and Culture Important?

Memory is stored in schemas, the cognitive frameworks, no matter who you are. Yet each gender posesses certain "advantages" and people from different cultures have their first memories at various times.

Gender

Studies show that women are more evolved in terms of episodic memory. Emisodic memory is a
long-term memory based on individual expiriences. These verbal tasks that favor women include remembering words, pictures, everyday events, objects, and remembering faces, especially of females. When a study was performed, women were given faces of hairless and make-upless men and women. When shown again, participants remembered the faces that were mostly of the women. Also women perform better in almost no verbal processing such as recognizing smells.

At the same time, however, men are not as disadvantaged as it may seem. When it comes to visuospatial precessing, which is remembering symbolic and non-linguistic information, the male population take the lead. So in case you get lost in a forrest with your boyfriend (assuming you are a female), the man has better chance of finding way out, so you better stick with him. On the other hand, there are cases when women remeber the location of car keys because it requires both, verbal and visuospatial processing.


Culture

Studies have shown that people from different cultures can recall their first memory at different ages. People from a Pacific island may recall a memory of a funeral of a family member as early as 2.5 years old. While Americans remember their first memory in average obout the age of 3- 3.5, Korean adult will remember an expirience from when he was 4 year old. A study proved that people who focus on family history (eg. tribal legends) and talk about it more to their children, are more likely to have early memories, in comparison to Asian population who values individuality.

Also recent evidence from the University of Michigan revealed that Americans focuse more on objects and categories, while people from Asia and Middle East focuse more on contextual details, simillarities and function. An experiment has been done where Americans and people from Turkey were given paired words. While Westerners paired a squirl with a racoon, because they are both animals, Easterners tend to pair squirl with a nut. At the same time, Angela Gutches, the head of the Aging, Culture and Cognition Laboratory, stated that if you depend on using categories you may make some errors. For example if you remember context of paper - red, you may end up switching paper - blue, in case the color blue was on the list of words.